So sad to me that Demon was my favorite line but seemed to be the forgotten step child of White Wolf. Truth though is Demon didn't seem to fit with the others at all in terms of story. So far as NWoD goes, they got the story so much better for Fae than OWoD ever did.

Demon came out too close to the end of the oWoD, and wasn't given the time to grow on the players. I've had no actual gaming experience with it, but boy, would it make some cracking side characters. (My original ST was the absolute king of crossover, and it's rubbed off on me. )

Heh, that's definitely a matter of opinion. I found most of the NWoD art to be rather bland and typical of the genre but OWoD, while some of the earlier edition art is terribly campy, had some fantastic art direction. I loved the style of V:tM and Changeling: the Dreaming.

I'm not even going to pretend I understood Mage: the Ascension's complex "magic" system. I think Lunar is right though and magic is such a broad term.

As far as parts of it being "real", no. Not at all. It's a game. It may have a basis (a very loose one at that) in the Christian mythos but that does not make it real. I never understood the idea that playing such games would make you a sinner or someone who is going to conjure something from beyond because it deals with "occult" symbols.

As far as parts of it being "real", no. Not at all. It's a game. It may have a basis (a very loose one at that) in the Christian mythos but that does not make it real. I never understood the idea that playing such games would make you a sinner or someone who is going to conjure something from beyond because it deals with "occult" symbols.

Well, personally, there was a time when I deeply believed in the Christian religion. Back then, demons *were* real for me. I don't subscribe to Christianity anymore, but who knows, maybe there really is a degree of truth to that...

I really would be afraid to play Demon or Mage now. I'd be really afraid that it would make susceptible to some real evil...

But really, I admit that I have this deeply-rooted fear that demons and magic might be real. I mean, read some interviews with real-life exorcists...

As someone whom was an agnostic a hairs breadth from an atheist at the time of reading it, and one whom LOVED Memnoch the Devil, no. I was never concerned with it being true, at all, in the least, nada. Demons and Mages are for fairy tales, stories and games, not for real life. They're incredibly interesting stories and themes, touching on the archetypes of heroes and redemption that show up all the time in our histories fictions, and they play on symbolic representations of our own struggles in day to day life.

Symbolic, powerful, fascinating and entertaining in the fictional mediums they exist in, never once were they ever a story of real life.

I mean...it's from a gaming company

As for the evil bit, I take from Shakespeare and American Horror Story, "There are no devils in hell, they're all here," and "all (devils)monsters are people."

To play Devil's Advocate (Ha!), symbols can be very powerful to people. They can govern and influence peoples' lives and perceptions. What might be unreal to one person might be very real to another. I personally think that demons and all that are not going to appear out of thin air because I am playing a role playing game based on their mythos.

Anywho, symbols only have power if they're given it and to what depths is up to the individual. I very much enjoyed the tale of once great noble heroes of old falling into becoming little more than sadistic monsters, leashed unto the world and then thrown back into bodies. Some of which even possessed a quality or qualities that reawakened that old part of themselves that once believed in doing good for humanity, to the point of bringing them to fight their own kind and the world left behind by a rather cold and uncaring authority figure.

Mage is just great in that they straight up use symbolism to the point of abusing it, straight up saying the symbols are just that, symbols, but since they mean something to the character, they work. Not that the symbols have power, but that the belief behind them in fact does and can quite literally, with enough belief, change the damn world. Clever White Wolf.

Also, anytime someone uses the word 'Succubus' all I can ever remember is my drunken friend saying it over and over until it became 'suck a....' well I"m sure you know the rest.